‘Will The Storm Soon Be Over?’ Winners and Losers in the 1997 Crisis in Rural Java

Abstract

In the dominant discourse in Indonesia, villages are often viewed as harmonious, homogeneous communities, able to care for their weaker members by gotong royong and other traditional arrangements of solidarity and mutual help. The 1997 economic crisis reveals that this stereotypical view has blinded government officials and intellectuals to the hardships of the rural poor and to existing inequalities in rural areas and between regions. Two detailed case studies of villages in Java show the persistence of widespread inequality and poverty, the crisis’ differential impact on richer and poorer people, and the local government’s inability to deal with local problems. The impact of the crisis on rural Java has been severe for the structural poor, villagers without access to land, capital, a stable income, and good social relations. National recovery will make little difference to them, since they will not directly benefit from it. For them, and the new poor, who lost structural access to resources during the crisis, more drastic measures should be taken, which, however, can only be carried out if the local government has been reformed and trained for its new tasks.

Keywords

• Indonesia
• rural Java
• crisis
• socio-economic analysis
• local level
• responses